Henry Edwards Huntington
Born	February 27, 1850 Oneonta, New York
Died	May 23, 1927 Philadelphia
Spouse	Arabella Huntington

Henry Edwards Huntington (February 27, 1850, Oneonta, New York–May 23, 1927, Philadelphia) was a railroad magnate and collector of art and rare books.^[1] Born in Oneonta, New York, Huntington settled in Los Angeles, where he owned the Pacific Electric Railway as well as substantial real estate interests. In addition to being a businessman and art collector, Huntington was a major booster for Los Angeles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

History in Southern California[link]

Henry E. Huntington was the nephew of Collis P. Huntington, one of The Big Four, the men instrumental in creating the Central Pacific Railroad (later called Southern Pacific), one of the two railroads that built the transcontinental railway in 1869. Huntington held several executive positions working alongside his uncle with the Southern Pacific Transportation Company. After Collis P. Huntington's death, Henry E. Huntington assumed Collis Huntington's leadership role with Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Virginia, and married his widow Arabella Huntington. His divorce from his first wife, Mary Alice Prentice, in 1910 and marriage to Arabella in 1913 after Mary Alice's death shocked San Francisco society. [1] He had four children with Mary Alice: Howard Edward, Clara Leonora, Elizabeth Vincent, and Marian Prentice, but none with Arabella. Arabella's son Archer, from her prior marriage from which she was widowed, had earlier been adopted by Collis.

In friendly competition with his uncle's Southern Pacific, in 1898, Huntington purchased the narrow gauge, city oriented Los Angeles Railway (LARy) known colloquially as the 'Yellow Car' system. In 1901 Huntington formed the sprawling interurban, standard gauge Pacific Electric Railway (the PE), known more familiarly as the 'Red Car' system, centered at 6th and Main Streets in Los Angeles. This competition with his uncle's Southern Pacific could be achieved by the need for passenger friendly streetcars, on 24/7 schedules, that the railroads couldn't match—and by the boom in Southern California land development—where houses were built in distant places, like Orange County's Huntington Beach, a Huntington sponsored development, where streetcars served passenger needs that the railroads had never considered. Connectivity to Downtown Los Angeles made such suburbs feasible. The discovery of significant oil reserves in Huntington Beach in the 1920s made residential development unnecessary.

By 1910, the Huntington trolley systems stretched over approximately 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of southern California.^[2] At its most robust size, the system contained over 20 streetcar lines and 1,250 trolleys, most running through the core of Los Angeles and serving such nearby neighborhoods as Echo Park, Westlake, Hancock Park, Exposition Park, West Adams, the Crenshaw district, Vernon, Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights; The system integrated the 1902 acquisition, the Mount Lowe Scenic Railway above Altadena, California in the San Gabriel Mountains.^[3]

In 1905 Huntington, A. Kingsley Macomber, and William R. Staats developed the Oak Knoll subdivision, located to the west of his San Marino estate in the oak-covered hilly terrain near Pasadena.

The Huntington Mansion, 1915; now the centerpiece of the Huntington Library.

In 1906 Huntington, along with Frank Miller, owner of the Mission Inn, and Charles M. Loring, formed the Huntington Park Association, with the intent to purchase Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, build a road to the summit, and develop the hill as a park to benefit the city of Riverside.^[4] The road was completed in February 1907.^[5] The property was later donated to the city of Riverside by the heirs of Frank Miller, and today the hill is a 161-acre (0.65 km²; 0.252 sq mi) city park.

Huntington retired from active business in 1916. In 1927 Henry E. Huntington died in Philadelphia while undergoing surgery. He is buried, with a large monument, in the Gardens of the Huntington Library.^[6]

Hotel[link]

The Huntington Hotel was originally named Hotel Wentworth when it opened its doors on February 1, 1907. Financial problems and a disappointing first season forced the Hotel Wentworth to close its doors indefinitely. Railroad tycoon and art collector Henry Huntington purchased the Hotel Wentworth in 1911, renaming it the Huntington Hotel. It reopened in 1914, transformed into a beautiful winter resort. The 1920s were a prosperous time for the hotel, as Midwestern and Eastern entrepreneurs discovered California's warm winter climate.

The Hotel's reputation for fine service began with a long-time general manager and later hotel owner Stephen W. Royce. By 1926, the hotel's success prompted Royce to open the property year-round. The "golden years" ended with the stock market crash and the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, by the end of the 1930s the hotel was back on solid ground. When World War II began, all reservations were cancelled and the hotel was rented to the Army for $3,000 a month. Following the war, the Huntington's fortune turned upwards once again. In 1954 Stephen Royce sold the hotel to the Sheraton Corporation remaining as the general manager until his retirement in 1969. The hotel continued operating until 1985 when it was forced to close because of its inability to meet earthquake standards. The unusual structure was completely built of un-reinforced concrete as it was built in 1906.

After a two and a half year major renovation the hotel reopened in March 1991 as the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel and Spa. The hotel completed a 19 million dollar renovation in Jan 2006. The hotel changed hands in early 2007 and became Langham Brand International, Huntington Hotel & Spa.

Legacy[link]

Huntington left a prominent legacy with the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens on his former estate San Marino near Pasadena. Other legacies in California includes the eponymous cities Huntington Beach and Huntington Park, as well as Huntington Lake.

Also in greater Los Angeles are the Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, Henry E. Huntington Middle School in San Marino, and the grand boulevard, Huntington Drive, running east bound from downtown Los Angeles. Its landscaped central parkway was previously the right-of-way for the Northern Division of the Pacific Electric.

Postcard of sightseers, circa 1910, driving up Mount Rubidoux in Riverside, California via Huntington Drive.

Riverside's city park on Mount Rubidoux was originally named Huntington Park, and the road to the top was named Huntington Drive.^[7] After Frank Miller's heirs donated the property to the city, the city renamed the park the Frank A. Miller Rubidoux Memorial Park, and the road has become known as Mount Rubidoux Drive. A plaque that was dedicated to Huntington in 1907, in recognition of his contributions to the development of Mount Rubidoux, remains on a large boulder known as Huntington Rock.^[8] After Huntington's death a second tablet was placed on the north side of the hill at a place named the Huntington Shrine.^[9]

His legacy in on the East Coast includes: the Huntington Park on the James River in Newport News, Virginia at one end of the James River Bridge, community landmark named in his honor; and the Huntington Memorial Library in Oneonta, New York,^[10]

Portraits of Huntington were also painted by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury; a full-length, based on a photograph, is at the Howard Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, and two seated versions, a small one of which was the property of Huntington's son-in-law John Metcalf, and a larger one which was engraved by an artist called Witherspoon in 1928.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Brown, John jr and Boyd, James. History of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, Lewis Publishing, 1922.
• Dickinson, Donald C., 1995,Henry E. Huntington's Library of Libraries, Huntington Library Press,ISBN 978-0-87328-153-9
• Friedricks, William B., 1992, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California,Ohio State University, ISBN 978-0-8142-0553-2
• Gale, Zona. Frank Miller of the Mission Inn, New York, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938.
• Hutchings, DeWitt V. The Story of Mount Rubidoux, Riverside, California.
• Wenzel, Glenn. Anecdotes on Mount Rubidoux and Frank A. Miller, Her Promoter, Glenn E. Wenzel, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4507-0502-8

Citations and notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Henry Edwards Huntington

• Find A Grave, Henry Edwards Huntington
• Find A Grave, Arabelle Huntington

Don Bachardy
Bachardy at 19 – Photo by Carl van Vechten (January 1954)
Birth name	Donald Jess Bachardy
Born	(1934-05-18) May 18, 1934 (age 78) Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Field	Portrait artist

Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California.

Life and work[link]

Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he met on Valentine's Day 1953, when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48. They remained together until Isherwood's death in 1986. A number of paperback editions of Isherwood's novels feature Bachardy's pencil portraits of the author. A film about their relationship, titled Chris & Don: A Love Story, was released in 2008.

Bachardy studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. His first one-man exhibition was held in October 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London.

Since that time he has had many one-man exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. More recently, he exhibited at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, in 2004–2005.

His works reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum of Art in San Francisco, the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institute, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Six books of his work have been published. His life and works are also documented in Terry Sanders' film The Eyes of Don Bachardy. He collaborated with Isherwood on Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). His book Stars in My Eyes (2000), about celebrated people whom he had painted, became a best-seller in Los Angeles.

One of Bachardy's most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Governor Jerry Brown hanging in the California State Capitol. (The California state official biography page for Governor Jerry Brown features a photograph of the painting.)

Most recently, Bachardy made a cameo appearance in the movie A Single Man (starring Colin Firth) based on Isherwood's book of the same name—he portrays a professor in the teacher's lounge, to whom Firth says "Hello. Don."^[1] Bachardy told Angeleno Magazine in their December 2009 issue: "Chris got the idea for that book when he and I were having a domestic crisis. We'd been together 10 years. I was making a lot of trouble and wondering if I shouldn't be on my own. Chris was going through a very difficult period (as well). So he killed off my character, Jim, in the book and imagined what his life would be without me."

Bachardy still lives in Isherwood's Santa Monica home (his place of residence for over 50 years), where he paints portraits for gallery shows and on a commission basis. In January 2010 he showed a retrospective of self portraits (from 1959–2009) at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica.^[2] In Fall of 2011, Bachardy exhibited portraits made over the last 40 years depicting acclaimed artists from Southern California, including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha at Craig Krull Gallery in conjunction with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time.

Works[link]

• Frankenstein: The True Story. 1973 (with Christopher Isherwood)
• October / O. Methuen, London 1983 (with Christopher Isherwood), ISBN 0-413-50040-3
• One Hundred Drawings. Twelvetrees Press, Los Angeles 1983
• 70 x 1 Drawings. Illuminati, 1983
• Drawings of the male nude. Twelvetrees Press, Pasadena 1985, ISBN 0-942642-18-X
• Christopher Isherwood: Last drawings. Faber and Faber, London/Boston 1990, ISBN 0-571-14075-0 (mit John Russell, Stephen Spender)
• Short cuts: the screenplay. Capra Press, Santa Barbara 1993 (with Robert Altmann, Frank Barhydt), ISBN 0-88496-378-0
• The Portrait. Imprenta Glorias, 1997
• Stars In My Eyes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2000, ISBN 0-299-16730-5

Bibliography[link]

• Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (2004)
• Daniel Curzon: Remembering Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. In: Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly. Volume 6 (2004), Issue 1
• Chris & Don: a Love story (2008)^[3]
• Lee Prosser: Isherwood, Bowles, Vedanta, Wicca, and Me, (2001), ISBN 0-595-20284-5

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Eyes of Don Bachardy (American Film Foundation)
• Portraits by Don Bachardy
• Nudes by Don Bachardy
• Don Bachardy at Craig Krull Gallery
• Oral history interview with Don Bachardy, 2009 May 21 – Oct 7 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art